As an essential element of this ambition, Russia sought to undermine Ottoman strength from within by stirring the national ambitions of the Sultan’s subject Christian peoples, in particular those with whom it shared a common Orthodox religious heritage, the Greeks and the Slavs in the Balkans and the Armenians. At the same time, Russian imperial ambitions turned southward as the Czars sought to gain control of Ottoman territory to extend their landlocked empire to the Mediterranean and the open seas. Czarist Russia at the time was beginning a major new imperial expansion across Central Asia, in the process overrunning major Turkish Khanates in its push toward the borders of China and the Pacific Ocean. In fact, however, one must really go back to Russian activities in the East starting in the 1820’s to uncover its origins. One can easily point to the Russo-Turkish war (1877 -78) and the Congress of Berlin (1878), which concluded the war as marking the emergence of this question as a problem in Europe. The so-called “ Armenian Question” is generally thought of as having begun in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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